This Background is intended to provide the basic context of this patent application and it is not intended to describe a specific problem to be solved.
Enterprise businesses have to deal with a massive amount of information related to their customers, emails and any proprietary information. Regulatory requirements by various governments also add significantly complexity and need to be complied to avoid running into any legal issues with the government. Today, corporations have to adopt various types of information lifecycle management tools/applications that very expensive to employ and cost more to scale and keep up with the amount of massively data on a daily basis.
Today's solution also put the unnecessary burden on the users. The consumer of the data is given the onus of determining the usage statistics with little knowledge of the underlying hardware or system. This leads to the usage information on hard drives to be anecdotal and usually incorrect, hence, eventually useless. This usage data cannot be easily collected from the host, and on a storage system. In this case, the host has little if any visibility to the underlying disk structure. As enterprise level disk arrays span hundreds or even thousands of hard drives, this usage data is unlikely to be stored on the array as well. Without accurate usage statistics, information lifecycle management can only be implemented at the file, object, or logical unit number level only either on the host or the array.